Category: WebKit Report

The last Friday 25 of July, National Day of Galicia, started very early because I had to travel to Strasbourg, official seat of the European Parliament, not for any political duty, but for the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference, the GUADEC!

My last GUADEC was in The Hague, in 2010, though in 2012, when it was hosted in Coruña, I attended a couple talks. Nonetheless, it had been a long time since I met the community, and it was a pleasure to me meet them again.

My biggest impression was the number of attendees. I remember the times in Turkey or in Gran Canaria where hundreds packed the auditoriums and halls. Nowadays the audience was smaller, but that is a good thing, since now you get in touch with the core of developers who drive and move the project easily.

We, Igalia, as sponsors, had a banner in the main room and a table in a corridor. Here is a picture of Juan to prove it:

Juan at the Igalia’s booth.

Also I ran across with Emmanuele Bassi, setting up a booth to show up the Endless Mobile OS, based on GNOME 3. The people at GUADEC welcomed with enthusiasm the user experience provided by it and the purpose of the project. Personally, I love it. If you don’t know the project, you should visit their web site.

The first talk I attended what the classic GStreamer update by Sebastian Dröge and Tim Müller. They talked about the new features in GStreamer 1.4. Neat stuff in there. I like the new pace of GStreamer, rather of the old stagnated evolution of 0.10 version.

Afterwards, Jim Hall gave us a keynote about Usability in GNOME. I really enjoyed that talk. He studied the usability of several GNOME applications such as Nautilus (aka Files), GEdit, Epiphany (aka Web), etc., as part of his Masters’ research. It was a pleasure to hear that Epiphany is regarded as having a good usability.

After lunch I was in the main room hearing Sylvain Le Bon about sustainable business models for free software. He talked about crowd funding, community management and related stuff.

The next talk was Christian Hergert about his project GOM, an object mapper from GObjects to SQLite, which is used in Grilo to prevent SQL injection by some plugins that use SQLite.

Sunday came and I arrived to the venue for the second keynote: Should We Teach The Robot To Kill by Nathan Willis. In his particular style, Nathan, presented a general survey of GNU/Linux in the Automotive Industry.

Next, one of main talks from Igalia: Web 3.12: a browser to make us proud, presented by Edu. It was fairly good. Edu showed us the latest development in WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany (aka Web). There were quite a few questions at the end of the talk. Epiphany nowadays is actively used by a lot of people in the community.

After, Zeeshan presented his GNOME boxes, an user interface for running virtual machines. Later on Alberto Ruiz showed us Fleet Commander, a web application to handle large desktop deployments.

And we took our classic group photo:

Group photo

That Sunday closed with the intern’s lighting talks. Cool stuff is being cooked by them.

On Monday I was in the venue when Emmanuele Bassi talked us about GSK, the GTK+ Scene Graph Kit, his new project, using as a starting point the lessons learned in Clutter. Its objective is to have a scene graph library fully integrated in GTK+.

After the lunch and the second part of the Foundation’s Annual General Meeting, Benjamin Otte gave an amusing talk about the CSS implementation in GTK+. Later, Jasper St. Pierre talked about the Wayland support in GNOME.

When the coffee break ended, the almighty Žan Doberšek gave the other talk from Igalia: Wayland support in WebKit2GTK+.

In the last day of the GUADEC, I attended Bastien Nocera’s talk: Hardware integration, the GNOME way, where he reviewed the history of his contributions to GNOME related with hardware integration and the goal of nicely support most of the hardware in GNOME, like compasses, gyroscopes, et cetera.

Afterwards, Owen Taylor talked us about the GNOME’s continuous integration performance testing, in order to know exactly why one release of GNOME is faster or slower than the last.

And the third keynote came: Matthew Garrett talked us about his experiences with the GNOME community and his vision about where it should go: to enhance the privacy and security of the users, something that many GNOMErs are excited about, such as Federico Mena.

Later on, David King talked about his plans for Cheese, the webcam application, turning it into a DBus service, using the current development of kdbus to sandbox the interaction with the hardware.

Afterwards Christian Hergert talked us about his plans for Builder, a new IDE for GNOME. Promising stuff, but we will see how it goes. Christian said that he is going to take a full year working on this project.

The GUADEC ended with the lighting talks, where I enjoyed one about the problems around the current encryption and security tools.

Finally, the next GUADEC host was unveiled: the Sweden Conspiracy: Gothenburg!

Three weeks have passed since I wrote the last WebKit report, and they did so quick that it scares me. Many great things have happened since then.

Let’s start with my favorite area: multimedia. Phil landed a patch that avoids muting the sound if the audio pitch is preserved. And Calvaris finally landed his great new media controls. Now watching videos in WebKitGTK+ is a pleasure.

Claudio, besides his work in the snapshots API that we already commented, retook the implementation of the notifications API for WebKitGTK+. And, while implementing it, he fixed some crashers in WK2’s implementation. He has also given us an early screencast with the status of the notifications implementation: Check it out! (video).

Carlos García Campos, besides working hard on the stable and development releases of WebKitGTK+ library, has also landed a couple of fixes. Meanwhile, Dape removed some dependencies, making the code base more clean.

Claudio, whilst he waits for the review of his API to retrieve a snapshot, he retook the Notifications API work for WebKitGTK+, particularly for WebKit2. Also, and just for sake of landing something, he fixed a couple of minor compilationglitches.

The great WebKit hacker, Martin Robinson is exploring uncharted territory in the project: He’s trying to get away from port-specific things, by scratching in the core stuff, but the serendipity showed up, so he found some pretty serious port-specific bugs that have relatively straight-forward fixes.

In addition to all this work, Martin is working on a patch for mathvariant itself. The mathvariant attribute allows easily using the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols in MathML without having to type out XML entities. For instance this:

<mi mathvariant=”fraktur”>HI GUYZ!</mi>

will be rendered like this:

Carlos García Campos cooked a patch for fixing the WebKit2 GTK+ API by implementing the resources API, removed recently, using injected bundle. This is another effort to bring back WebKit2 into WebKitGTK+.

This a new weekly WebKit Igalia’s report. And the last week has been a shaky one.

Let’s start with a warm welcome to Žan Dobersek as collaborator student, who is working hard in a lot of cool matters: gardening the bots, cleaning up the Coverity run output, modifying the WebCoreTestSupport to decrease the dependency WebKit2 API, digging in a stack size problem in JSC, and much more fun stuff.

This weekly report project was supposed to start after the last WebKit hackfest, but my holidays got in between and now I’m recovering of them 😉

Here we go:

In summary, in these last three weeks we have had 15 commits and done 23 reviews.

Martin and Carlos have been working on the authentication mechanisms. Now they can be hooked ,through the web view API, by the applications, which could take control of the dialogues and credentials handling.

Martin has also been dealing with text rendering with complex layouts (such as Arabic). This effort leaded, finally, to the removal of Pango in favor of Harfbuzz.

Now let’s talk about Carlos’ baby monster: the injected bundle patch. As you know, in WebKit2, the engine has been split in two isolated processes the UI and Web processes. The first is in charge of the user interface, and the former deals with HTML, CSS and JavaScript handling. Meanwhile this approach adds more robustness and responsiveness, also imposes more complexity because it is required an IPC mechanism to interact with the Web process. This is particularly hard for accessing to the DOM bindings.

Carlos, since the last year, has been working on his injected bundle patch, which offers a mean to support loading plugins in the web process using injected bundle. Hence, through DBus, an application could load a plugin to communicate, indirectly, with the Web process. This approach is supposed to be the milestone for the DOM bindings in WK2GTK, and also provides a mean to pre-fetch DNS registries. This patch has been happily pushed just recently, in the second week of January.

If this was not enough, Carlos also released the development version of WebKitGTK+ v1.11.4.

Now let us go to the multimedia realm, my favorite land.

Philippe finished the port of his patch for WebAudio support to GStreamer 1.0 as backend. And now he is porting the full-screen support in Gst 0.10 to Gst 1.0 in order to reuse ans share the same base code. Aligned with WebAudio, Philippe is developing a new audio source provider that gathers raw audio data from the MediaPlayer and pipe them into the AudioBus if it is required.

Xabier has been working to deliver a nice and neat HTML5 media controls, using stylable GTK+ controls. And myself, I’m still playing with the audio pitch preservation.

Another great landmark for us is a11y, and here Joanie has been working hard to bring back the accessibility tests on GTK to a sane state. And also keeps her efforts to enable an access to WebKit for Orca.

In other sort of things, Berto has been fighting against a bug on GtkLaunch, which was shown in Epiphany too when displaying only images. Meanwhile, Dape, lurked on spell checking support for Qt WebKit2. And Sergio enabled, by default, the WebP image handling.